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Sunday, October 2

AirMech is an upcoming top down shooter, real time strategy hybrid game by Carbon Games Studio. The first gameplay footage was shown at PAX 2011 and since then it has garnered quite good response from viewers.

In the game, you fly an aircraft with an ability to completely transform into a mechanical warrior thus serving as a multi-utility vehicle. Check out the PAX 2011 footage below:

The game has been completely made with open source tools and the developers are particularly proud of it. Gradually during the development, all closed source tools/libraries were dropped.

We are not against licensing or using proprietary middleware, but so far on every step it showed to be an obstacle. An obstacle in terms of lock-in onto specific platforms, or if a middleware vendor is not interested to support some platforms we are considering, or just requiring signing complex agreements.

To us as an indie developer, freedom to pick any platform we want and port our code base to, is really important. Other benefits of not having middleware is that we don’t have to annoy players with splash screens which are often required by middleware providers. We want players to get into the game as quick as possible, without waiting and staring at product or company logo for some time limit defined in some licensing agreement.

This project wouldn’t be happening if it wasn’t for this open source or at least our progress wouldn’t be as rapid as it is.

How they chose their game tools? This chart below nicely summarizes their way of working:

Read more about this on their blog post. If you are a game developer, you should definitely read this. A complete list of open source tools they have used can be found here.

Back to the game now. AirMech looks highly inspired from classic game Herzog Zwei, released way back in 1989. You can watch gameplay videos of both the games below:

When asked about Linux version of this game, devs have confirmed it on twitter that a Linux version will be definitely there. Currently the game is in closed alpha state with a Windows only build. You can sign up for it from here.